Amazon Kinesis Streams enables you to capture, store, and analyze terabytes of data per hour from clickstreams, financial transactions, social media feeds, and more. Starting today, you can use the new UpdateShardCount feature in the AWS Management console or AWS CLI to to scale your streams up and down automatically to match your data volume and processing needs in real time. For example, you can call UpdateShardCount from an AWS Lambda function to automatically scale the shard capacity in your stream in response to an Amazon CloudWatch alarm or Amazon CloudWatch metric. For more information, see UpdateShardCount in the Amazon Kinesis Streams Service API Reference.

In addition you can now monitor how you are utilizing your Amazon Kinesis Streams shard limit using the new AWS DescribeLimits API. DescribeLimits returns the count of open shards and the shard limit for your account. If you need additional shard capacity for your stream, submit a shard limit increase request.